“Gods of my fathers,” Gurkarl croaked. “I am the first gurvan to view this cavern in almost two hundred years! Blessed am I!”
“When I was a boy,” Koucey ventured, tentatively, “This chamber was filled with all sorts of foul junk. Much of it was gold and silver. There were many jewels. My father ordered it sorted. The valuables we sold to merchants in the East. The rest we just left.”
“It must have been impressive,” I commented, stepping through the new-made doorway.
“It was. Impressive and thoroughly evil. They sacrificed even their own kind to their foul gods. We found goblin heads in niches all along this wall, victims of sacrifice.”
“Those were the heads of my ancestors!” Gurkarl snarled. “They were kings and great shamans of the past! Their heads were placed here as a token of highest honor!”
“I’ve heard of the skull cult in the gurvani,” Penny mentioned conversationally. “They believe the spirit of their ancestors reside in the head, rather than the heart.”
“The custom is not limited to the gurvani,” I replied. “The Crinroc have a cult of skulls, as do some of the other barbarian tribes.”
“Like your ancestors?” she asked, eyebrows cocked jauntily. This was an old game that we played: she would advance the cause of Imperial culture, while I championed (weakly) the customs of my people. She was correct, in this instance. My forefathers had a fetish about collecting the severed heads of the Imperial soldiers who opposed them and stacking them in huge pyramids.
“Yes, actually, much like the steppe barbarians who toppled the Magocracy.”
“Disgusting habit,” Koucey hissed bitterly.
I walked over and began to examine the piles. The largest was mostly trash, bits of cloth and leather and bone, broken pottery and the like. I tugged out my blade and poked through it while Penny looked at another pile and Gurkarl gazed adoringly at the pictographs.
Koucey stood near the entrance and pouted. I had dropped most of the control spells for him, but I had a few left that would snap back into place like a dog’s leash at the first sign of trouble. He was behaving himself, for now, but I knew he would try something eventually.
I picked up two large pottery shards and fit them together. It was beautiful work, a primitive but vibrant design in vermilion and jet, showing dancing gurvani figures and strange beasts intertwined. It spoke of a sophisticated culture, perhaps more advanced than the where the gurvani found themselves today. I felt the faint remnants of the magic that had once inhabited them. Gurkarl was right; this had been a reverent and holy place for many, many generations. Religious magic always has a certain feel about it, and this place felt like I was wading in it up to my hips.
I moved on to a charred and broken section of wood – some ancient shaman’s staff, I gathered, from the shape and feel of it. There were no remaining spells, and it felt as if the entire thing had been expended in one last, desperate act of defiance. I pictured gnarled black, furry hands clutching the thing as the original owner fought to protect this shrine from defilement.
“Hey, what about these?” called Penny from one of the other piles. I dropped the shard of staff and came to look at what she had found. It proved to be a pile of parchment – well-cured animal skins, actually – covered with the runic gurvani language. In the absence of moisture and vermin – and perhaps because of the innate power within this place – they had remained relatively intact, though spots were burned here and there.
“Can you read gurvani?” I asked her.
“No, can you?”
“Nope. Gurkarl? Come here a moment, would you?”
The gurvan ambled over, a profound sense of contentment surrounding him despite the state of the temple. He halted at the pile and furrowed his brow at it.
“Holy books?” he asked.
“We were hoping you would know.”
“I was a smith, not a shaman. I know my letters, but this is more than I can read. Without a lot of work,” he amended.
“And you’re not particularly anxious to provide aid and comfort to the enemy. I understand.”
He shrugged his shaggy shoulders. “In a few days, it will not matter. The Old God is coming.”
“Stop saying that!” Koucey howled from where he had slunk. “He is not! It’s an evil heathen superstition! A damned lie to try to make us yield!”
The gurvan and I looked at each other, then at Koucey. “Well there is something coming,” I said, slowly and deliberately, “and it will flatten us like so many bugs, superstition or not.” I turned back to the pile and Gurkarl. “Can you even tell me what they might be? I don’t want to take a lot of trouble for your great-great-great aunt’s bread recipe. Well, I might, for the novelty value. But it would be helpful if I knew what they said.”
He appeared to give it great thought, then nodded. “I will try. It will take me a while, and more light would be helpful.” I raised my hand and another globe, smaller by half but twice as bright, came into existence over the pile. The gurvan grunted, then began sorting through the papers.
Penny had moved on from the pile, more like she was moving through a busy market looking for cloth than searching an ancient shrine for it occult secrets. I shrugged. Penny responded unusually in any situation. She had seemed perfectly content to languish in a prison cell, but I’ve seen her thrash a lazy serving girl for spilling soup and publicly humiliate tavern owners over the cleanliness of their establishments.
We continued poking around the cave noting a number of points of interest. There were strong sorceries still woven into the very rocks around us, and I soon verified that Koucey had sealed the place because he was unable to destroy it when I found broken and abandoned mining tools.
That cave was a magical wonder. It was a fascinating study of gurvani magic. I’d gotten mere glimpses of the subject before now, enough flashes of their methods during combat and the power of their enchantments on the goblin stones. I’d even started to recognize a few of their techniques, I’d thought, becoming familiar enough with them to perhaps find weaknesses. The magic in the cave thoroughly dismissed that notion as naive.
This was gurvani magic at its peak. The spells woven into the fabric of that space were complex tapestries of subtle magics, every bit as elaborate, ornate, and functional as the Imperial style. Or, hell, I admitted to myself, as good as the Tree Folk’s unique and potent system. The entire cave was a complex and delicate magical device with hundreds, nay, thousands of possible uses.
The runes painted so painstakingly on the walls had bound intricate spells for working the weather, assisting the growth of crops, promoting fertility amongst the people, appealing directly to the gods. Spells for healing were held within the crystal formations, spells for religious initiation were worked into the walls in iron. I was amazed at how many of the formations seemed to have multiple uses. It rivaled the fabled Palace of the Archmage before my people ruined it, or the Tower of Gellmari at the peak of its power.
It was also a terrible weapon. While I could not really say for certain, a good third of the spells about me had the sleek and deadly feel of war spells. Some required living sacrifice – that much I could see – and some were so obscure and powerful that I classed them as martial by default. There were amplifiers and dampers and filters and all sorts of magical control mechanisms that would allow a little power to go a long way – and a lot of power to become devastating.
I realized that a talented mage – especially if assisted with irionite – would be able to do a serious amount of damage to someone. A dozen or so magi who knew what they were doing would become unstoppable.
And the Old God had hundreds of shamans.
Was this, then, the answer to our prayers? This wonderful artifact, this product of lifetimes of gurvani wizardry, would it allow us to turn the tide and throw back the Old God?
No, not really. I considered it eagerly, though. The thought of using the cave to strike down the Old God, to drive his armies back and destroy him utterl
y was pretty appealing. But I would have been a fool to mess around with a magical style I wasn’t familiar with. I couldn’t even read or speak their language, and that would be essential if I was to understand even the basics about how that cave worked. Sure, there were a few things that I was pretty sure I could use, given time to study them, like the spells for prosperity and fecundity and increasing the fish supply. But that dark tangle of warspells scared me. I would use them only in a suicidal rage.
“While you are down here,” Koucey said, after clearing his throat loudly, “perhaps your brilliant mind could clear up a mystery.” He walked over to a roundish hillock of rock that sloped up from the floor and into a flat, clear space on the wall. “We always thought that this altar was used for a particularly cruel death, hanging upside down while disemboweled, for example. But that never seemed to be right. There was no idol, see, in front of it. Just a circle cut into the rock, ringed by stones. Some of them were precious, and removed, as was the gold. But why would anyone sacrifice to a god of . . . nothing?”
“There were some old Imperial cults who worshiped in Rada, goddess of emptiness, back during the Early Magocracy’s Decadent period,” Penny offered. “It was stylish for a while, but she was never popular. Who wants to go talk about nothing all night?”
“I can’t see this being a hang-out for the sophisticated courtiers of the Imperial nobility,” I replied, dryly. “Of course, your folk had some pretty depraved ideas during that period. No, Koucey is right.” I studied the thing more closely, slipping up a more and more detailed form of magesight as I did so.
I quickly came to the conclusion that the area around the blankness was also the center of what the Imperials call molopar, or spatial insecurity.
This is a complex subject which I’m going to attempt to paraphrase, so don’t get upset if you don’t understand it the first few times around. I know I had several sleepless nights wrestling with this concept back when I was taking Advanced Magical Theory at the Academy.
Consider a piece of cloth. From five feet away, it appears solid, a sheet of fabric. From two inches away it becomes a rolling landscape of intertwining threads. No matter how sturdy the cloth, there are going to be places where it is weaker than others. Take my sister’s first piece of loomwork, for example. In places the threads were so thick that they formed lumps, while in others the threads were so thin that you could see through them. Even the best pieces of storm-rated sailcloth will develop rips and tears along weak spots.
Now if I looked very carefully at a piece of cloth I could find the thinnest spot and push a needle or something right through it with very little effort. Reality is like that cloth, except that it isn’t flat, it isn’t woven, and it isn’t particularly cloth-like in any other way, save to poets and weavers.
Without devolving into technical jargon, there are places where the very “fibers” of reality are so thick that magic has trouble working there. There are also places where reality is so weak that it occasionally rips and tears for an instant, and sometimes things slip through or other catastrophes occur. This was all theory, mind, but it was theory backed up by centuries of experimentation.
Lodestones had something to do with it, it was thought, as were the arcane mathematics of astrology, but the standing theory had been that it was possible to discover “thin spots” in reality and, if one had masterful control and access to a gargantuan amount of power, one coulr press a metaphysical “needle” through it. Why one would want to do this, except for the pure curiosity of it, is beyond me.
A molopar isn’t really a thing, an event, or even a place, but it can be all of them. There are even regularly occurring, fairly stable molopars which seem to move with the regularity of the planets and tides. It is a condition of reality, and the truth is we really don’t know shit about them, save how to occasionally identify them.
Here it was, a molopar, just like the two called the Twins near a waterfall in Sabra, where strange bolts of fire sometimes shoot out into the river for no good reason, or the thing out over the ocean known as the Stormbringer because it was supposed to (surprise!) affect the weather. There have been others recorded, but most were unstable, fleeting affairs that could rain fish on a town or create enigmatic patterns in wheat fields over night. A molopar was a weak spot that could, theoretically, be connected to any conceivable point, points, place, places, time or times in the universe.
Magic worked easier around the vicinity of most molopars, it had been suggested, due to the more plastic nature of reality. They were extremely rare and difficult to detect, and their very existence had sparked centuries-old controversies in erudite circles about the very nature of the universe. A stable molopar, and its immovable, anti-magical opposite, the jevolar, was a natural curiosity.
This one had been discovered by the gurvani and improved. If a “regular” molopar was a thin spot, then this thin spot had been reinforced. Consider it a grommet in the fabric of space-time. In effect, a portal to . . . where?
Or when?
Or . . . what?
The possibilities taxed my imagination, and I realized then why the Old God wanted the place back so badly. If he had as much power at his disposal as he seemed to, then this place would make him about as omnipotent as a deity could ask for. Here he had a direct connection to worlds and planes of his choosing. It would take a lot of power, but he seemed to have an endless supply of irionite and an army of devoted – nay, fanatical – followers. A pity he wanted to kill off my entire race.
“So,” Sire Koucey asked after he had decided I had studied it enough. “What is it?”
I sat down in front of it and tried to remain calm. In the proximity of my sphere, it could be quite dangerous to let the absolute fear that was rising up my gullet manifest itself magically. I began to feel old, and tired, so very tired of all of this. Despair beckoned to me, inviting me to just give up, while anger and fear insisted that my tired body and my over-wrought mind do everything in its power to keep the Old God and the molopar from ever meeting. Somewhere in the middle they crashed, and there was little I could do about it. At least a few more things made sense.
“It’s a gateway to pretty much anywhere. I can’t tell without a far better understanding of gurvani magic, but I believe that this portal, when activated, could lead to anywhere in the world. Or any other world. Or to a lake of fire, the bottom of an ocean, a poisonous hell, or to nothing at all. This hole in the wall surrounds a rip in reality, or something like that. When the Old God gets here, he will be able to use it to do pretty much anything he wants.”
Koucey looked shocked. “Then we must destroy it!”
“Impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible,” he said, gallantly.
“Actually, destroying the molopar would be. You see, there isn’t an ‘it’ to be destroyed. Even if you could disable the protection spells and bring this cavern down, it would still be here. You could flood it, burn it, hit it with a rock or pelt it with pillows, it still would be there. It will be here long after these mountains have eroded away. No, this molopar could well be our doom if Old Grouchy gets ahold of it.”
“Then the Old God must be stopped!” Koucey announced, as if by will alone it could be accomplished. Plenty of noble fighting spirit left in the old bird.
“The Old God cannot be stopped!” Gurkarl called out from where he was crouched by the manuscripts. Penny returned from her snooping to see what all the commotion was about.
“Both of you shut up!” While it felt good to say it, my feelings fueled the desire. The silence spell that I’d used so recently on Koucey was back up, and extended to the gurvan as well. I shook my head when I’d realized what I’d done and started to take it down when I stopped. A few moments of peace would be welcome.
I didn’t get it.
“This is a molopar?” she asked, intensely interested, “Like the Twins?”
“Yes, it is. At least I think it is. A real, honest-to-gods stable molopar, augmented by ancien
t gurvani shamans to let them travel anywhere, and bring anything to them that they wanted. Probably an artifact left over from the wars between the Alka Alon and the gurvani a few thousand years ago. By itself, that would be amazing. Put it together with the magic in this cave, and it’s a wonder how the gurvani ever lost any war.”
“I think they forgot how to use it. Min, some of these enchantments are thousands of years old. I’m not a specialist in magical archeology, but if the results of my tests are correct, the most recent spells used here were the ones devoted to fertility and prosperity, along with the war spells. There are great works here that haven’t been used in millennia. They seem to have had a pretty advanced civilization – but that was a long time ago, long before the Magocracy, even. They had a very advanced culture, probably with a civilization to match. I wonder if the Old God could date from that time?”
“It would make a lot of sense. But how, exactly? Time travel? With the molopar that would be theoretically possible – and it would explain why he wants it back so badly. Or perhaps he’s just been asleep? There are theoretical stasis spells that would preserve someone in a time-free environment. Cerd Larne did some impressive experiments a few decades ago. Such a spell would not be beyond the ancient gurvani, if these enchantments are any example of their craft. And, of course, there is the possibility that he is just a regular old pissed-off deity of vengeance.”
“Does it matter?” she asked, shaking her head so her hair flopped gracefully over her shoulder. “If he’s coming here, we can assume for the sake of argument that it isn’t for the mystical and cultural importance of the site. He’s after that thing. So we had better decide if there is some way we can use it against him.”
The Spellmonger Series: Book 01 - Spellmonger Page 35